Unless otherwise indicated herein, approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims listed below and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
To meet the exploding demand for higher capacity, increasingly advanced receivers are considered and developed to combat various scenarios. For example, in Long Term Evolution (LTE) Rel-12, the so-called Network Assisted Interference Cancellation and Suppression (NAICS) receiver is standardized in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to effectively cancel inter-cell interference. As the name implies, some information is provided by Evolved Node B (eNB) to aid interference cancellation. From the perspective of eNB, inter-eNB information exchanges are required to provide the information to user equipment (UE). However, depending on the backhaul type, there could be delays of inter-eNB information exchange that can be intolerably long for NAICS receivers to work properly. In this case, the information conveyed to a UE would be outdated, and would not match to the current scheduling decision. In this case, the overall performance would be much degraded making it even worse than a conventional Rel-11 receiver.
In general, when an advanced receiver involves much estimation and detection, the estimation/detection results can also become inaccurate, thereby degrading the overall performance to be worse than the conventional receiver. To cope with this problem, a dual receiver structure can be used. In this type of receiver, multiple receivers run in parallel. In LTE, for example, a default receiver, such as a Minimum Mean Square Error and Interference Rejection Combiner (MMSE-IRC) receiver, and a NAICS receiver could run in parallel. However, in the last stage (i.e., before feeding the decoding metric to the decoder), some selection or combining methods are necessary. Without this, the turbo decoder would need to run twice, which is not desirable.